If I Die In Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home.

O'BRIEN, Tim.

Item Number: 5772

New York: Delacorte Press, 1973.

First edition of the author’s first book. Octavo, original half cloth. Lengthily inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “To Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd Le Doux and John, With best wishes and many thanks for buying this and not checking it out of your library!! Tim.” Fine in a near fine dust jacket with light shelfwear. A nice example.

The author takes us with him to experience combat from behind an infantryman's rifle, to walk the minefields of My Lai, to crawl into the ghostly tunnels, and to explore the ambiguities of manhood and morality in a war gone terribly wrong. Beautifully written and searingly heartfelt, If I Die in a Combat Zone is a masterwork of its genre. "O'Brien brilliantly and quietly evokes the foot soldier's daily life in the paddies and foxholes, evokes a blind, blundering war. . . . Tim O'Brien writes with the care and eloquence of someone for whom communication is still a vital possibility. . . . A personal document of aching clarity. . . . A beautiful, painful book" (The New York Times Book Review).